Good Fact

Grow Diamonds Instead of Buying Blood Diamonds

- Adam Clare 2 Comments

Blood diamonds are a problem for a multitude of reasons and they really shouldn’t be since we can create diamonds from scratch. A company called Pure Grown Diamonds sell diamonds that are grown in a a lab for all your diamond needs. The market for diamonds is largely a social construct based off of good marketing, so you may as well play it safe and go for lab-grown diamonds instead of buying diamonds from sketchy sources.

How are Pure Grown Diamonds made?

Pure Grown Diamonds are produced by utilizing two gem-quality diamond creation processes: High Pressure-High Temperature (HPHT) and Chemical Vapor Deposition (CVD). In both processes, a small diamond seed is placed in an environment that contains carbon. Under suitably controlled conditions, the diamond grows, atom-by-atom, layer-by-layer, recreating nature’s process.

Grown Diamonds—Eco Advantages

In a recent environmental impact analysis, Frost & Sullivan (F&S) concludes the impact of the Pure Grown Process is seven times lower than Diamond Mining.

Mined diamonds disturb more land, produce more mineral waste, use more water, create more air emissions (carbon, NOx and SOx), use more energy, have more environmental incidents, result in more lost time injury (both in terms of frequency and severity) and have a higher occupational disease rate. Based on their calculations, F&S further concludes that mined diamonds represent more than 7 times the level of impact as compared to grown diamonds.

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The Future of Green Burials Lies in the Past

- Adam Clare

The modern funeral industry took something that was natural and safe and converted it into a toxic-filled death. When people die we need to dispose of the body in an appropriate way to ensure diseases don’t spread, human civilizations have been doing this for millennia.

However, in the past hundred years we have started taking corpses and filling them with toxic chemicals which means we can’t bury the bodies like we used to. Toxic corpses are more dangerous than non-toxic ones and this has caused people to reflect on what to do.

Green burials are growing in popularity as a result. Indeed, we first looked at green burials back in 2007.

Green burials are the minimalist, eco-conscious burials of the future, but emerging from a history deeply rooted in the past. The dead are wrapped in cloth shrouds or placed in simple coffins made from natural materials like cardboard or pine and buried in a green space, such as a rural or woodland area. “It turns a gruesome procedure into something more natural and celebratory,” explained Mark Harris, author of Grave Matters: A Journey through the Modern Funeral Industry to a Natural Way of Burial.

He describes the process as, “returning a body into the earth, where it’s allowed to degrade naturally, renourish soil, push up a tree, rejoin a natural cycle of life.” And, green funerals are much cheaper, with most costing in the low thousands, whereas the median cost for a funeral requiring a vault comes in at over $8,000. According to Harris, “the current cemetery functions less as a resting ground for the dead than a landfill of non-biodegradable and sometimes hazardous materials.”

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Victims of Kodaikanal Mercury Poisoning Protest Unilever

- Adam Clare

One of the worst disasters in India since the Bhopal incident, the Kodaikanal mercury poisoning continues to cause harm. Obviously this is not a good thing. What is good is that activists in the area are using every tool at their disposal to raise awareness and call for a boycott against Unilever.

Key demands of the campaign
The Governments of India and Tamil Nadu should ensure that Unilever

  • Cleans up the mercury contaminated factory site and surroundings to international standards that are adequate to protect the sensitive watershed forests of Pambar Shola.
  • Pays for long-term environmental monitoring for mercury buildup in the food chain in the forests and aquatic ecosystems in and around the factory
  • Provides adequate financial compensation to workers and arranges for long-term medical treatment, monitoring and rehabilitation for workers and their families.
  • Provide avenues for economic rehabilitation of the workers and their families.
  • Prosecute Unilever and its officials for their criminal negligence in Kodaikanal.

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A Model Hotel in Vienna Employs Refugees

- Adam Clare

Vienna is a ritzy and classic city which has seen a lot of history through the rise of the Habsburg family. It’s a city where tourists flock to due to its ornate beauty and opulence.

Magdas Hotel is a hotel in Vienna which has done something unique: it employs refugees while they await their paperwork to be cleared. The hotel crowdfunded support for the program and is now a great model of how to use the talents of refugees who have trouble finding work in their respected fields.

“This building which is now a hotel was once an old people’s home,” Martin Gantner from Caritas told Al Jazeera. It was renovated and charitable donations were used to procure furniture, he said.

“Through crowdfunding, we collected 70,000 euros [$76,000] for the hotel last year,” Gantner said. The organisation uses all the profit from the hotel to pay salaries and buy supplies.

“It is just awful and pointless that refugees remain jobless for years because they legally cannot work, even though some of them are so talented,” Gantner said.

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Fossil Fuel Divestment Continues to be Profitable

- Adam Clare

The ongoing process of investment firms divesting from fossil fuels continues to be a good idea for the planet and for profits. It’s worth noting that the big push behind this was a student-led movement to get universities to divest their giant pools of money from unethical investments.

Let’s hope that this continues for many years to come!

* When SRI investment professionals divest of fossil fuel companies, the three places they are most likely to reallocate those investments are: renewable energy companies (59 percent); “proportionately across the remaining portfolio (56 percent); and clean technology companies (52 percent). (Respondents were allowed to provide multiple answers to this survey question.)

* Many more survey respondents (61 percent) are concerned about “stranded asset” risks to investors created by climate change than those who are not (15 percent). Only one in four respondents either don’t know about or are unsure about this “carbon bubble” risk.

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